Design language

Since this thread is titled "Design Language" I wanted to pop in as one of the designers here at 1Password. First off, I wanted to say thank you for caring so much, and to let you know that the design team is actively listening, trying to gather a lot of this feedback together, and will be figuring out how to incorporate it into the designs going forward along with all the feedback we've gotten from our early user tests, and other channels. Seriously, knowing so many people care means a lot. I've been here for 14 years and have helped to lead the design language through every version since version 2 and we all internally care a ton about this stuff and work hard to try to get it right, and to iterate and change things when needed.

Regarding some of the spacing concerns specifically: to mverde and 1P_Ben's points, the designs for those were actually done before we knew what technologies were going to be used to build the apps. That's why they are saying it would have been the same regardless of the technologies used. Being "native" does not mean using only standard controls and 1Password 7 used a ton of custom designed controls throughout (including the entire sidebar and many of the buttons and other bits). Many of the Mac apps I love the most use completely custom interface components and spacing, using native AppKit controls. As Ben mentioned already, we have been playing with some designs using tighter spacing over the last few weeks as well (and earlier too).

There are definitely some concessions we have to make in the design when using Electron, but there are a lot of concessions we've made with designs in the past due to what AppKit allowed, or at least based on what we actually had time to get implemented when working on multiple apps with very different frameworks, etc. It's a tough call and there are a lot of pros and cons on both sides. As a long time Mac-nerd, and someone that constantly pushes to just make the best apps we possibly can for our users (and ourselves) I've been on both sides of this and have had to acknowledge that it's much more nuanced than I originally thought, and that in practice both methods have their fallbacks and we need to move forward with what we think is going to help the most people with the knowledge we have. And continue to iterate as we gain more knowledge.